Emotions are integral part of human beings connecting body with brain. Srimad Bhagwadgeeta 14/10 deals Triguna as a vital concept behind emotional feelings and behaviour of an individual. Attachment created by dominance of Rajas guna make a person jealous. But attachment of perverse tendency originated from ascendance of Tamas leads to functional jealousy with intense emotional feeling. Such tendency hypnotizes the person and, the person becomes incapable of rationality. Charak Samhita Nidanasthana 7/4 suggests such jealousy as one of the cause with other causes aggravating dosas that affects heart and mind. So, it is important to recognize the trigger and maintain the emotion. Otherwise such emotion progresses to anger and negative outcome. Trigger is based on “others’ success as own failure”. It is associated with vulnerabilities and protection of relationship, knowledge, money, self-esteem, functional status at workplace etc. Zurriaga et al. (2018) studied jealousy at workplace and, presented that rival’s social communal attributes evoking highest level of jealousy in men while women responded with rival’s physical attractiveness.
Neurological connection of jealousy was studied by Maninger et al. (2017). The study was done on non-human primates (coppery titi monkeys) and was published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution on 19th October 2017. The study revealed the neurological spike in cingulate cortex and lateral septum of brain during jealousy. They also observed higher concentration of cortisol. Various studies expose the increased cingulate cortex in cases of selective attention and response selection, a common disposition of jealous mind. Too much of cortisol is associated with high anxiety, irritability, increased blood pressure, muscle weakness etc. Detailed study based on changes of neural substrates and neurochemical alteration due to jealousy is still not done.
Discernment of jealousy with specific context may be varying at individual level. But, it is true in every context for each individual to realize and maintain the trigger, before it hijacks the emotions and starts causing physiological changes.